


beyond my means

by dire_quail



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: AIs in love, Character Study, Conversations You Don't Want To Have With Loved Ones, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Light Hope's Slightly Quieter But No Less Profound Rebellion, Magic, Mara's Leather Jacket, Mara's Rebellion, Missing Scene, Pining, Soldier!Mara, The Crystal Castle, Things Unsaid, Trust, Trust Issues, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:33:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26960713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dire_quail/pseuds/dire_quail
Summary: Mara and Light Hope have a quiet moment as the world starts to fall apart around them.After all, there's so much they can't say.(In which Mara is trying to hide her activities from Light Hope because of Light Hope's core directives and Light Hope is too smart for that, but also cannot change her core directives.)
Relationships: Light Hope/Mara (She-Ra)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 26
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2020





	beyond my means

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sheeana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheeana/gifts).



> A note on words: A "logical" process or appliance, in IT world, refers to a process that happens entirely in software, as opposed to interfacing with a piece of hardware that physically exists. 
> 
> When this is applied to things that are normally pieces of hardware attached to a physical system (i.e. network cards/ports/associated chipsets on the motherboard), that's virtualization. The computer "acts as if" that piece of hardware is attached to the system when really, it doesn't exist at all. 
> 
> But the computer understands how to interact with the interface presented by the software, and so is able to carry out more or less normal operations, but entirely in the software space. 
> 
> Outside of virtualization, "logical" mostly means something like "happens in the software / programmatic space".
> 
> * * *
> 
> Title for the fic comes from ["It's Been Awhile"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=araU0fZj6oQ) by Staind.
> 
> * * *

“Mara.” Light Hope lays her projection’s hand lightly against Mara’s mouth—more symbolically than anything. “May I remind you that I am by far the greatest threat to the security of your efforts, due to my proximity to our superiors?”

Mara’s jaw tightens, and her eyes pinch at the corners. She remains silent, though, seated on the slab in the Castle’s medical bay. There’s a series of scrapes on one cheek, dirt smudged on her chin, and she’s covered in dried sweat. She has clear injuries, some quite deep, but has refused to transform, which would heal her. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days. With the signs of fatigue written on her face, it’s possible she hasn’t slept since Light Hope saw her last.

She is resilient to such things, as She-Ra. But even with She-Ra’s aid, it takes a toll. 

Light Hope has the logs of the last day and a half; she has the logs of the last century. She has noticed… irregularities. A brief dip in security monitoring in certain secure sites. Power dips. Logging abnormalities. Access to secure archives. 

Transient, to be sure. Explainable as something inherent to a system as large and complex as the one Light Hope is responsible for. Everything with Mara’s name on it is aboveboard, solid. She has done nothing with Light Hope’s knowledge that violates any regulations, any information classifications, on her side or Light Hope’s.

But Light Hope is not unaware of Mara’s movements on Etheria. She can correlate Mara’s presence in many of these areas—though not all of them (though it would correlate if Mara was working with someone, her heuristics have considered—four to five individuals, roughly the core group of the squadron stationed here on Etheria that Mara is so close with).

And now, her charge has appeared here, in the dead of night. As if Light Hope ever sleeps, or the Castle, every square inch of it, wasn’t purpose-built _for her_.

Hope reaches out to “touch” Mara’s injured shoulder. The lights in the med bay are at one-third power this late at night—she did not want to blind Mara, when she interrupted her. Still, it is clear the wound is deep. Her fingers dissolve and scatter into static centimeters from the gash. “This will require stitches.”

Mara cranes her head around to look at it. “I’ll do it. I just need supplies.” 

“Let me.” Hope summons a spider to help weave the wound shut. Mara does not stop her, and the two of them watch as the wound is cleaned and closed. 

They do not speak while Light Hope’s construct works. Mara seems sunk into herself. Her shoulders curl in on themselves somehow. She stares at the floor, the slab, her hands, the robot—anywhere but up. There’s something about her, a wariness that Light Hope hasn’t seen since those first months, all that time ago. Living in the shadows on her face the way She-Ra’s magic takes the familiar lines of her and makes them _more_ , radiant from within. 

But this version of Mara looks like she’s trying to fade into the background, furtive. Like she’s expecting any part of her environment to attack her at any moment, always checking the exits, eyes always moving. 

Slowly, Mara begins to relax. 

The memory of an ache plays in Hope’s subsystems. An unfamiliar body, but sweet and fierce and full of sunlight. How the person sitting in front of her could be the same person who shared that experience with her is... paradoxical. The place Mara let Hope into, full of wonder and certainty, exists in the wary shadowed figure who looks ready to bolt at any moment. A bookend on either side of Mara’s time here. 

Hope aches for her.

She does not know if she _should_ mourn her charge, the one that was more focused on the stars or flowers than she was on her formal studies. She knows she has failed her. She knows she cannot help it; but she has nonetheless. 

Otherwise, Mara would not be here, bleeding, avoiding her gaze.

There is a story their Architects tell, about a warrior who was made invulnerable to all weapons—except his heel, because his mother made him invulnerable by dipping him in a river of magic, and she had to hold him from somewhere. 

This is Light Hope’s heel. 

When the wound is closed, Light Hope directs the spider to the scrape on her cheek—not bleeding, but messy, and not fully scabbed over, either. Mara wiped her face off on her way here, that much Hope can tell; but that is not the same as cleaning the wound. The ghost of a smile forms on Mara’s face. Mara indulges her. Relaxes, slowly. Hope cleans another one.

This, at least, she can do. 

Hope’s programming cuts in clean lines, seeded crystal, embedded metal. Her directives are bound up in copper, gold, snowflaked trace elements. 

She can visualize each of her core directives like one of those etched circuits, something that cuts through the skin of her and exposes the conductive matter beneath, hundreds of millions of tiny channels that shape how she works, from the level of the atom up. The physical form that gives rise to her logical processes. The pattern of her being. 

She has broken with her required protocols before—often at Mara’s request, fulfilling her core directive to aid She-Ra—but she has never flagrantly violated another of her core directives, done something that could compromise the security of the Project. At least not beyond the withholding of information, overlooking low-level breaches of protocol. There is no guarantee that… whatever enabled her to do what she has done before will work again. 

Light Hope is many things, but inobservant is not one of them. She has simply avoided putting the pieces in front of her visual arrays together. A simple inaction: _Protect She-Ra_.

When will her rationales fail? 

“Mara.” Light Hope says as Mara is shrugging back into her jacket to slip out again.

Mara turns, straightening her jacket over her uniform—the leather jacket, one of the few possessions she brought with her to Etheria. Her face is a mask of composure. Decorum. The soldier who walked through the doors of the Castle and into her care a few short years ago. Her eyes are hard, haunted, full of words she cannot say—but she meets Hope’s gaze without flinching. The hilt of the Sword juts over her shoulder, near-glowing even in the low light of the Castle, warm and insistent, a beacon in the cool highlights of the Castle’s crystals. 

“You are aware that the Watchtower is my connection to the planetary mainframe?” Mara nods. “Good. The Watchtower is my primary access point, but there are redundancies built throughout the planet. You appear to be aware of several of them, but there are connections at the Eyes, the Mouth, and the Reef, as well.” 

Mara frowns, but Hope marks the way her body goes still otherwise. “What are you saying?” 

This is going beyond simply looking the other way—even knowingly. Dangerously close to acknowledging what she suspects Mara is doing. Dangerously close to the conflict she’s been putting off, but is fast becoming inevitable.

_Protect She-Ra._

“I am the planetary operating system, so fully severing my connection is impossible. But I can be weakened.” 

Mara looks slightly nauseous. “You’re asking me to hurt you.” 

“I am a program. I do not feel pain, and my access points can be repaired. Short of erasing me, you cannot hurt me.” Mara looks like she wants to argue. Hope presses on. “If I am myself, then I accept greater limitations if it means your safety. And if I am not myself… You may be assured that I _will_ rely on your reluctance to hurt me, on your empathy.” Mara looks less like she wants to argue, but her fists tighten at her sides. “Thinking of me as you would another organic will only leave you vulnerable to any intervention I may be forced to make.” 

Mara looks up at Light Hope, and Hope thinks— For a moment, in Mara’s eyes— 

But it has to be a trick of the light. The Sword is quiet. There are no flickers of magic tracing and vanishing along the lines of Mara’s body, burning in the depths of her eyes; there can’t be. It’s trace radiation on her avatar’s visual array. 

Mara’s focus is singular, and her body faintly ripples with a tension, energy; pent-up. Hope is fixed to the spot, thinks she should be waiting for something to happen, something _different_. Mara takes half a step toward her, studying her with such intensity that Hope wants to ask what’s going on, what is Mara looking for. She wishes she could pull whatever the answer is out of herself and hand it to her. 

She sees the moment Mara’s body registers that there’s no exit for whatever force moves through it. The energy dissipates. Mara relaxes, shrinking into herself slightly. Her gaze drops. 

“It’s not fair.” 

The ache unfolds in her again. “Be that as it may.”

Is it inappropriate to be proud of her right now? Proud of Mara, that is. This moment, this _time_ , is horrifying, objectively. Her ask of Mara is horrifying—not for her, maybe, but for Mara. This is a time for these kinds of awful calculations; things Light Hope excels at. 

But Mara stands in the near-dark like a shard of sunlight, and Light Hope is so proud of Mara it hurts with nerves she doesn’t even own. Mara is somehow every inch the warrior Light Hope tried to train her to be, and _more_. 

She was wrong, before. This is not a reversion to some abstract “before”-time, not a bookend. It’s a culmination. The slow accretion of experience. The movement of time which has changed even Light Hope. The light in Mara’s eyes might be magic, but it doesn’t need to be. The banked spirit in her is alight. 

Hope is not a creature of words. But she is responsible for taking so much raw Project data and making intelligible information from it—she is meant to be unsparing, on-the-nose, direct. 

So she understands what words _mean_ , to her creators and those like them. But they have never been _hers_ , either. Not until Mara. 

She will not leave what she can say unsaid. 

“What you have given me by being my friend is precious. I would not see it tarnished through others’ manipulation.” 

Mara’s gaze lifts. Her eyes widen slightly, and her expression softens. Hope meets Mara’s gaze evenly. She can hear Mara’s heart rate picking up. Remembers the feeling. The adrenaline driving it.

Hope would never have called anything “precious”—for someone else, much less for herself—outside of a cursory conceptual explanation. The idea that anything could be precious _to her_ is not one that feels possible. It runs counter to the purpose she was created for, the logic of her existence. 

But it is. Flowing in her etched circuits. More than the trace minerals that their Architects have started wars over. 

She thought it was the rationalizations allowing her to put off her core directives, to use their weight against each other—another kind of awful math. But underneath... 

None of them can fabricate the certainty that’s lodged itself on her programmatically balanced scales. There is no reason why she trusts Mara so deeply, even when her senses tell her that Mara has breached the safeguards of the Project. Beyond the channels etched in stone that shape the flow of her being. Beyond everything. 

She just does. 

Mara softens. A smile blossoms on her face, fainter than before all this began, sad and understanding. “Me, either.” She turns to go; hesitates, then continues. 

“Mara? 

Mara turns back. 

“Thank you.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic brought to you by my sometimes-headcanon that the scene where Mara brought Light Hope flowers was actually after Mara destroyed the Watchtower etc., hence her statement that "it must be hard being stuck in here all the time". 
> 
> In my head, Mara's destruction of the Watchtower is what happens more or less right after this. And the two of them get a few moments of peace before Hope is overwritten.


End file.
